The Branch Locator

In banking, the concept of the local branch is a slightly tricky one - for a great many people, it's like a safety net: almost everything is now done online or at an ATM, and you hope not to actually have to go to a branch, but when you do need to go there tends to be no substitute.

Unfortunately, this puts the banks in a tricky spot, because providing local branches is very costly, especially as they are used less and less - you have to pay staff whether they're doing anything or not, so the goal should be to try to minimise that "dead time". And it's not as if there are many efficiency savings to be met; a branch needs a minimum staff presence to be able to securely deal with the monies involved.

The consequence of this is that banks have, quite naturally, encouraged people to move to digital and direct banking as much as possible (because it's much cheaper), and have cut down on the number of branches. (I would presume that the next step will be to cut down on the opening hours for the branches that remain. If they're wise, this will also be matched by a shift to branches being closed during business hours in the week, and open more often in evenings, at weekends, and, ironically, on bank holidays - the times when people are actually able to go. Of course, it won't happen like that.)

Anyway...

A few times a year, I find myself in possession of a cheque or two that need to be deposited into the bank - that being the main source of my having to actually go to a bank. And, naturally, the branch local to the flat is only open during business hours during the week, which means I either have to go late on a Friday or early on a Saturday.

Or, crazy as the notion is, I could always go to another branch. Which seems like a good idea - the website has a useful "branch locator" gadget, and my hours at work are flexible, so...

And so, for my latest scheme I plugged in my postcode at work, and discovered that there's a branch a scant 2 miles from the office. Huzzah!

Alas, my celebration was short-lived, because when I drove over to said branch, I discovered that, far from being open from 9am to 5pm (with an hour closed for lunch), it was in fact shut. Permanently. Indeed, it had been shut for months, boarded up, with all the signage removed (to the extent that I actually drove past it before realising what it was).

I guess it's my own fault really. I should probably have located the secret "find a branch that's actually open" button on the gadget. Silly me, assuming that such a thing should be implied.

(In other news, the competing bank where the band do their banking have also recently closed the branch closest to the office. So it's not like any of them are really that much better.)